A blast off that never happened

April 26, 2010|By Kendall P. Stanley

In the height of the cold war we all knew how to tuck, duck and roll — under our desks as if that would save our sorry little hides if the Soviets would deign to bomb our part of the world. And then there was site 571-7.

Site 571-7 sits just north of Green Valley, Ariz., one of several sites around the Tucson area where Titan II missiles were manned 24 hours at a shift by four members of the U.S. Air Force — two officers and two enlisted personnel.

Remember “Dr. Strangelove?” Well 571-7 was part of that MAD, MAD, MAD MAD world — the mutually assured destruction that the Soviet Union and U.S. practiced for years where if an ICBM missile was launched by one country, the other would fire its missiles and the world would be incinerated.

Site 571-7 is the last remaining Titan II missile site in the United States and it is a national historic landmark.

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Contained within its silo is a Titan II missile, one which was never loaded with fuel and was never fitted with a nuclear warhead. The warhead cone has a square cut out of it, and the cone is visible through a clear top so Russian satellites can look and see that it hasn’t been re-armed.

Yvonne Morris was an officer on one of the crews that spent 24 to 26 hours on duty below ground, and she now serves as director of the museum.

While most Americans did not question the mission of the site, the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements were less than enthusiastic, she noted on a recent director’s tour of the facility.

As you listen to her tell of the precautions, processes and backup after backup after backup that was the everyday part of the operation, you come away with the appreciation that no one ever wanted to trigger the massive rocket a few feet away from the command console — but their training meant if necessary in mere moments the rocket was off to Russia.

None of the Titans were ever fired, and all save the one at site 571-7 have been destroyed.

Efforts by President Obama to further draw down nuclear weapons around the world are laudable, especially when one thinks about the unthinkable — that someone would actually use a nuclear weapon.

But the world must do more to assure that members of the nuclear club — and there are many, including Britain, France, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel — back away from any nuclear engagements.

And of course we have Iran wanting to join the club, its claim of peaceful use of the atom notwithstanding — and not believable.

It’s reassuring that nation states can now sit down and decide to eliminate their nuclear stockpiles and back away from that MAD scenario. But the genie was unleashed from the bottle and it will never go back in. At least site 571-7 kept the missiles from flying during its time in service in the desert.

Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the Petoskey News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net